But Rosett’s essay is not a feel-good piece about how interesting it is to have what she calls a “broken brain.”  She suffers physically, cognitively, and emotionally from her injury.  As she talked about her pain and recovery, she also talked about memory and time.  I was struck by her experience of people who grieve that she does not know them, though she, not knowing them, feels no grief.  She noted that people with traumatic brain injury are often scolded for having “no sense of time,” and I found myself wondering what “sense” of time we expect others to have?  On what basis have we achieved this consensus?   I thought about Alzheimer’s and other illnesses that result in memory loss, and the frustration and sorrow that these diseases cause.

For friends and loved ones, the frustrations of brain injury and dementia are not just about forgetting, they are problems of identity.  Rosett’s friends felt that they had lost her, and indeed, a great deal was lost.  But what?  Where does our identity reside?  Is it in memory?  Who do we become when memory is no longer intact?  Are we defined by our connections with others?  If so, where is our identity when those connections are disrupted?   If I lose all of you, will I become someone else?

And what about our relation to time?  We go to places that seem outside of time to find ourselves:  a distant island, a quiet space.  Our minds journey to timeless states, immersed in books and music and art.  Yet, if we “find ourselves” outside the temporal, we can also lose ourselves outside of time.  Inception-like, the architecture of our mind becomes incompatible with the stream of time our body experiences.  And when our wills no longer suffice to pull us back from the out-of-time to the here-and- now, who do we become?

The other day I was cataloging a brochure from the 1930s advertising a dude ranch in Wyoming.  The artwork was wonderful, the prose colorful and inviting.

If you, the tired business man, are looking for a place to spend a vacation with your family where you can really get acquainted with your children once again by doing with them every day those things you have been wanting to do with them; or you, the mother, are looking for a place not made complicated by modern social conditions where boys and girls, and dads, are kids again, where the day’s fun or work has left all so refreshingly tired that an hour or two in the club house in the evening tops off a full day and send them to the feathers at 10:00 p.m., to sleep the clock ‘round—if it weren’t for the cursed rising bell,–then, oh well, you’d just better be writing to the ranch that this booklet is telling you about.

…you can ride for days with the cowboys and never leave the confines of the property.  Here you really lead the range life of a half century ago and obtain an intimate knowledge of the ranching game while fully enjoying health-giving hours in the saddle.  And when the day’s work or day’s play is over, you return to a hot tub or shower in your own cabin, to a real meal, and to a social evening in the club house or a quiet one in your little cottage; and then you are lulled to sleep by the rushing mountain stream that flows past your door.

I slipped into the spell of the salesman’s pitch as I read:

“TO ANTICIPATE QUESTIONS:  There are no rattlesnakes…. There are never any mosquitoes…after the first of July….It is comforting to know that we always have a splendid young physician and trained nurse in residence during the summer months.”

But then came a sentence that brought me up short:  “RESERVATIONS… No one is accepted against whom there can be the slightest racial, moral, social or physical objection.” And I wondered who could be accepted under those conditions?  And how could the writer be so blithely exclusionary?  My dude ranch romance was over, because I had bumped up against the past.

I thought about this dude ranch from 80 years ago, and how offended I was by their casual prejudice, and then I remembered this library’s well-considered statement:

The mission of the Library of Congress is to make its resources available and useful. The Library offers broad public access to a wide range of information, including historical materials that may contain offensive language or negative stereotypes. Such materials must be viewed in the context of the relevant time period. The Library of Congress does not endorse the views expressed in such materials.

If you work with historical materials, you know that times and attitudes can change a great deal over the years.  What was once commonplace becomes an affront.  But to ignore or censor the past diminishes our understanding of it, and as historians, we seek to understand people and events in all their complexity—good and bad.

Anyway, there’s free video editing software available on Barbie’s website (Windows/PC only–sorry Mac users) which will allow you to add music and special effects to your Barbie movies.   Just hook Barbie up to your computer and share movies with your family and friends!

If you think about it, unless you are Sid the evil genius in Toy Story, there are really only two things you can do with a Barbie–change her clothes and make up stories.   So I’m not surprised that someone would invent a way for children (mostly little girls) to capture the narratives they’ve always invented for Barbie.  It’s a cool idea and I’m all in favor of teaching girls to upload and edit video at an early age.  But the camera placement is going to take a bit of getting used to.  Hidden NecklaceCam reminds me of Cold War espionage and ChestCam is too much like Hooters ( a name which we all know refers to the owl in their logo).   Ah well, at least if some doll gets fresh, we’ll have it on tape–er, hard drive.

Finally, in the Just For Fun Category, take a look at this video comparing the Barbie Video Girl to a Canon 7D. You never know.  Maybe one day Video Girl will be a classic, just  like the Easy Bake Oven.

My childhood home is up for sale.  Having become too much for either a Presbyterian minister or a small town congregation to care for, the Manse in Moorefield, West Virginia is on the market as a “fixer-upper.”  It’s a beautiful house, built in 1858 and sitting on almost an acre of land right in town. When we lived there my parents were always very careful to remind their children that it was not actually our house—it belonged to the church—but the church seemed like home too, so the technicalities of legal ownership were of no concern to me.

When I found the realtor’s page online I couldn’t believe the house was for sale.  For some irrational reason I had assumed the church would keep the Manse forever.  I clicked through the photos and tried to remember what the house looked like with our furniture in it. I had not seen the inside since we moved right after I finished third grade.  The hardwood floors, the staircases, the fireplaces were like old friends I had encountered by chance on the internet.

The ceilings in the Manse were 11 feet high.  The bedroom I shared with my sister was the blue one with the view out into the hallway and the stairs leading up to the walk-in attic.  I remember sliding down the banisters of the matching staircases that met at the landing, and running my fingers over the carving on the steps.  I remember the texture and shape of the steam radiators that heated the house.  I remember my dad shoveling coal into the furnace down in the basement.

Most of my memories are of how it felt to be in that space.  Almost all the rooms had two doors so you could walk in a circle throughout an entire floor—there were no hotel-like hallways with rooms on the side.  Everything was connected unless you closed the doors.  It was a house where a small child could meander and explore.

In the back yard there was a big tree that I could climb, a sandbox made out of a tractor tire, and a sturdy swing set with bars that were perfect for turning flips or hanging upside down by your knees.  While I usually stayed in the back, the huge lot was surrounded by a hedge and a cast iron fence so I could run and play at will and no one worried that I would step out into the street.  One day, however, I did decide to ride my tricycle around the block.  I got as far as the firehouse before they found me and turned me around from my jolly outing.

We also had a large garden behind the house where we grew beans and sweet corn and carrots and lettuce and tomatoes and wonderful peas.   We tilled and weeded and watered and waited.  Then we picked.  It was so exciting when I was finally allowed to pick the things we’d planted.   They say that growing things will teach you patience, and though I cannot actually claim to be a patient person, I can at least wait tenaciously, knowing from experience that something will come up and ripen—if the birds don’t get it first.

So much of what we consider normal in our adult life is based on what we experienced in our childhood:  family relationships, ways of learning, the taste of food, the feeling of home.  We learn to adapt as we get older, but our expectations, for good or for ill, are often grounded in first memories.

I’ve lived in a lot of places since Moorefield.  My family left that small town and moved to a subdivision in Northern Virginia.  The ceilings dropped from 11 feet to 8 feet, and the trees were no longer big enough to climb.  High school was followed by college and marriage, and I lived in dorm rooms and apartments, a townhome and three very different houses.  But nothing has ever replaced the Manse in my memory.  When I imagine home, I think of hardwoods and open space.  It was a wonderful place to grow up and spoiled me forever.   Sometimes I still dream that I am in that house.

]]> http://www.justmusing.net/2010/04/01/the-shadow-inventory/feed/ 2 http://www.justmusing.net/2010/03/13/the-teacher-within/ http://www.justmusing.net/2010/03/13/the-teacher-within/#comments Sat, 13 Mar 2010 21:20:39 +0000 RovingLibrarian http://www.justmusing.net/?p=442 Continue reading →]]> My phone was broken.  Well, actually the phone was fine, but the screen was shattered, so with no way to access the data inside, I took a trip to the Verizon store and got in line.

I stood behind a woman with two daughters:  the younger child was running about the room playing with a ball, and the other was confined to a wheelchair playing with her mother’s car keys.  I didn’t recognize the older child’s disability.  She couldn’t speak, but she was alert and focused on her play.  She held a key ring with a big metal butterfly, a thick electronic car key and a number of regular metal house keys.

We all waited a very long time.  At last the weary mother ahead of me was called to the tech counter, and I sat down on the bench she had occupied.  As I did, an amazing, humbling thing happened.  The older child turned her full attention to me and, in a very methodical way, began to teach me how to play with keys.

I could see her watching me to see if I would get it.   She showed me how to shake the keys and tap them on the metal of the chair to make sound.  “That’s an interesting sound,” I said.  But she wasn’t finished.  There were more games I needed to learn.  She tossed the keys onto the bench to see if she could get them to land just at the edge of her reach, but not so far away that she couldn’t retrieve them.  She showed me how to drop the keys down into the wheel spokes and then roll forward or backward to try to bring them back within reach before the keys fell to the floor.  She seemed to enjoy setting herself a challenge, introducing the element of risk—risk, because if the keys fell on the floor she would need someone else to intervene before the game could continue.

As infants we develop what is known as “theory of mind” by which we attribute intention to the actions of others.  We imagine other minds—what they are thinking, what they know, what they are trying to communicate to us.  It’s how we make sense of a world with other people in it.  It’s how we connect.

I don’t know what made that little girl look at me and risk reaching out.  Why should she think there was a mind in my body when surely many people had assumed there was no mind in hers?   Where did that confidence come from?  And what brought out the teacher in her?  What led her to show me something fun that she understood and I did not?   I was just a tired woman with a broken phone in a long line until a child who could not speak decided to teach me something new.

The polite fiction differs from its cousins the White Lie (“Do these pants make me look fat?”  “Heavens, no!”) and Hypocrisy (“The bank has your best interests at heart!”).  For, while the white lie protects someone and hypocrisy acts as a disguise, the polite fiction indicates respect.  It seeks first and foremost to be polite, and is distinct, therefore, from Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell which facilitates denial.

Generally speaking, the polite fiction (“All teachers at our school admire one another and the principal”) is suspected or known by all parties to be a fiction, but the statement’s veracity is never pressed.  It acts like the willing suspension of disbelief—allowing all to maintain the personae they have constructed for the purpose of social interaction.

There is a place in this world for the polite fiction, though the practice may seem a bit quaint—like handwritten letters on elegant stationery.  It can also seem like too much effort when we’d rather just be ourselves and let other people deal.  Still, politeness is never out of fashion, and sometimes we are happiest when we don’t reveal how well we know one another.

BASEMENT CAT IS IN YOUR ROOT CELLAR

LOL-ING OBSCENELY

It was after I got home and started opening the box that the cognitive dissonance started to set in. While I am happy that my post-coffee cleaning burdens are lightened by the presence of “bowl-scraper fingers,” why did they call this feature the “Chamber Maid?”   Okay sure, it cleans the grinding chamber—and you can call that little bowl a chamber if you want to.  But “Chamber Maid” makes me think of French women in skimpy costumes (oo-la-la!) or of unpleasantries like chamber pots (pee-yew!).   Perhaps the oo-la-la image is meant to be a sort of pun on the whole idea of grinding (think “bane of school dance chaperones”), but I’m still not getting to coffee here in my brain.

And what about the gender thing?  Did I accidentally get the guys’ coffee grinder?  Does the ladies’ version come with a muscle-y grime fighter like Mr. Clean?  or a superhero like Chamber with a furnace of psionic energy in his chest? (“Because we know you like your coffee HOT!”)  Sometimes the best minds of the advertising industry elude me.   They take you down a path and suddenly you look up and wonder, “How did I get here?!”   Maybe I’ll just think of the Chamber of Commerce—they usually have a pot of coffee going, don’t they?

In my town, the Texas First State Bank flies a flag so huge that it’s a landmark.  It probably has more square footage than most of the apartments you’ve rented.  So when the bank took down that Texas flag  and replaced it with Old Glory, we knew it was time to get serious about the Fourth of July.  Our family headed on over to the city park for live music, funnel cakes, and fireworks.

Texas is good place to celebrate the Fourth.  In Texas you learn to be proud of your school, your state, and your country.   There is no one here too cool for a little flag waving on America’s Birthday–or any other day for that matter.  Besides, the eyes of Texas are upon you, so don’t be giving less than your best.

When they heard I was moving, lots of people warned me that Texans are mighty proud of being Texans.  These people were right.  I’ve never seen any place where  people decorate their homes with state symbols they way they do in Texas. At the grocery store, you are encouraged to buy products grown or made in the state with a Go Texan! sticker (contrast that with the less boisterous “Virginia’s Finest” or “Maryland’s Best.”) And here you can buy a Texas Edition Silverado, or a Lone Star Ram, whereas I can’t even imagine an Old Dominion F-150 or General Lee SUV.

Still, that famous Texas Pride is not always exactly what you’d expect.  The thing about Texas is that Texas—like California—is America, only more so.   It’s concentrated not diluted.   And while California is America at Play, Texas is America at Work.  Texans are not afraid to step up to the plate, to lift heavy objects, to do what needs to be done.  Texans are raised to be leaders.  The message is “Be proud of Texas and make Texas proud of you.”

Maybe that’s why folks really like it here.  76 percent of the folks born in this “sticky” state are still living here.  But, unlike the Californians with their “Welcome to California! Now go home”  bumper stickers, Texans will take you in too.  As Lyle Lovett says, ” You’re not from Texas, but Texas wants you any way.”   When you get a driver’s license, they say you apply to be a Texan.  Shoot, Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston were both born in Virginia; they just ended up in a better place.

Texas takes some getting used to.  It’s a complicated reality.  Not for the shy.  As my husband reminds me, Texas looks to the rest of America the way America looks to the world:  a little too loud, a little too proud, a little too religious, and just a bit crazy.   And most of the people living here wouldn’t trade it for the world.